WEST WHITELAND — If you go to Exton Square during the next holiday shopping season, you may find a wider choice of offerings than usual, from Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein to pediatricians and CAT scans.

The mall’s owner, Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, or PREIT, has announced that Main Line Health will open an approximately 32,000-square-foot ambulatory health-care facility at the Exton Square Mall.

PREIT says the diagnostic and treatment services the facility will have include family medicine physicians, obstetric and gynecologic specialists, oncologists, pediatricians and other specialists. It will also have physical therapy, imaging services, an infusion center and blood testing.

The facility is scheduled to open late in 2013.

Advertisement

The idea of combining retail and medical services under one roof may seem a little incongruous at first, but Judy Trias, PREIT’s vice president of marketing, says Exton Square actually will be the second such facility PREIT has installed in the area. The first, Mercy Health Center, opened last fall at the Plymouth Meeting Mall.

“What we’re finding is this has been done in other parts of the country,” Trias says.

PREIT also found that once available, the services were well received. “People are more time-starved. They try to fit a lot into a day,” she says. “Now they can do two errands while doing one trip.”

People trying to make efficient use of their time can get a medical procedure done, then have lunch and do some shopping, without having to drive to separate locations for the medical and non-medical aspects of the day. “We felt like it was really a good fit between the two,” Trias says.

The fit is good in part because the center will handle mostly routine, undramatic medical visits. It will involve “short procedures at most” such as getting a checkup, an X-ray or CAT scan, Trias says, as well as physical therapy and other wellness-oriented activities. And it’s not just the people getting the procedures who will benefit. If someone else drives you to get an MRI, she says by way of example, that person won’t be forced to sit and read magazines the whole time.

“They can be out and about, either shopping or having lunch, and then come back,” Trias says.

Trias says that although Main Line Health will set the hours for the center, being in the mall gives them the opportunity to extend the time it’s open so people could come on weekends or evenings, outside the normal work day.

The center is large enough to take up 25 percent of the mall’s lower level, says Mary Kay Owen, the mall’s marketing director. Some of the stores were closed or relocated to accommodate what Owens calls a “transformation” of the lower level’s layout.

Owen agrees with Trias that it makes sense to combine a health-care facility and retail opportunities. Urgent-care centers have set up in shopping centers in recent years, she points out, following people to where they run their errands.

“There can be a synergy between health care and retail” for people who are multitasking, she says.

“It brings health care to an extremely convenient location,” Owen says of the Exton location, “one of the most convenient intersections in Chester County.”